First time Buddypress installation guide

Hi .. Can someone point me to the definitive step by step installation guide for BuddyPress 1.7 using bbPress as the forum engine please ? There’s quite a bit of old stuff around on the Web including installing with WP MU and when BuddyPress had it’s own forum support. I keep finding a guide which looks like it might be appropriate and then get confused when some option or other isn’t in the settings.

With BP 1.7 and bbPress 2.3 it became really easy. Just install them the usual plugin installation way (automatic through WP or via FTP).
Best is you first activate BuddyPress, you will see a welcome screen with a direct link to the settings. Change them if you want.
Then go back to plugins and activate bbPress, you will see a welcome screen again. You will see three new admin menu items (Forums, Topics, Replies). Got to Forums and add a new forum, maybe called “Group Forums”. Got to the bbPress settings under Settings -> Forums. Change them if you want – and scroll down to the very last option: Activate group forums for BuddyPress. Choose you’re Group Forum, save it. – That’s all! Now go ahead and create your first group via BuddyPress in frontend group directory.

My problem is that in the Group front end directory there’s no button to create a new group (nor is there one anywhere on the actual site)! I’ve been combing the forums trying to find a way to solve this but just can’t figure it out – tried uninstalling and reinstalling BP, enabling and unenabling groups, all other plug-ins, changing themes, etc etc. Any ideas??

Thanks Fee … that worked up to a point. I’m using WP 3.51 immediately after a fresh install and so the default theme Twenty Twelve is being used. So, after your instructions (with a small uncertainly at the end) all I see on the nav bar is Home, Activities, Members, Sample Page. Nothing about groups or forums.

Your instructions mentioned ‘Activate group forums for BuddyPress’ which I couldn’t see on the page. What I got was

BuddyPress Forum settings for BuddyPress
Enable Group Forums Allow BuddyPress Groups to have their own forums
Group Forums Parent is the parent for all group forums
Using the Forum Root is not recommended. Changing this does not move existing forums.

The first box was ticked by default (which I left alone) and as instructed, I set the Group Furums Root to ‘Group Forum’.

So, why are there no Forums on the home page ?

Apologies if I’m being stupid here. I think you BP folks have done a great job .. however, I find the available docs not very user-friendly i.e. if I click on ‘documentation’ from the BP home page, I get a list of extremely esoteric items where I would expect to see a few idiot’s guides on installation, configuration etc etc. I reckon that I’m quite knowledgeable about WordPress having created and supported 3 sites, but I’ve found bbPress and BuddyPress very confusing.

first of all thanks for the compliment including me into ‘BP Folks’. So, I’m not part of the BP team (not yet…), I’m just an advanced user and dev for my own clients.

There were big changes in the last development versions (both bbPress and BP) and the documentation is not up to date. The devs put most of their time in developing the features – it would be great if some volunteers would come up, advanced users, to complete the documentation (that’s a lot of work, too). Everything you find here is done by the devs and the community (including folks like you) and offered for free. Maybe you can keep this in mind when you are more experienced in a few month to please come back and contribute something to the community as well. Like answering here in the forums, writing documentation and so on 😉

To answer your question: On the bbPress settings page you can change the slug for the forums. If you didn’t change it, it’s ‘forums’ – e.g. yourdomain.com/forums/
So go to your menus, set up an own menu, include a Link to Forums, save this menu to your primary navigation.

all I see on the nav bar is Home, Activities, Members, Sample Page. Nothing about groups or forums.

Thanks Fee … I will certainly look into writing something for newbies like myself (although maybe by the time I get to understand BP then I’ll have forgotten how I feel right now !)

If I’m being too much of a pain with my stupid questions, please ignore me! But otherwise, I’m very grateful for you spending your valuable time helping me out.

So .. Following your latest suggestions, I’m making some progress.

Things I don’t understand are:

1) On the main home page, I now see four menu items .. My own menu, Members, Activities and Groups. The first should be a link to my ‘Group Forum’ and I’ve set the URL to http://localhost:8888/forums/forum/Group Forum (I’m using MAMP on the iMac) .. but I get URL Not Found.

2) (and this may be connected to 1) … When I edit my forum page from wp-admin, I get a message at the top saying that I need to update my permalinks to something other than the default for BP to work. What should I set this to ?

3) For the other three menu items (Members, Activities, Groups), if I click on all of these I just get put into the WP page editor. What do I do next please ?

I’m sure that sometime in the near future I will suddenly see the light and understand all of this. At the moment it seems like a bit of a steep learning curve.

Can’t access it that way either. I’m pretty ignorant as far as hosting/servers are concerned, but could that be the problem? The IT guys for the company I work at put up this test site on our server and I’ve noticed that the error I get from your method (appending /create/ to the URL) is the same that I get when I try to access any of the links in the upper right-hand corner menu from the site itself (where it says “Howdy, Andy!”) – Activity, Groups, Settings, etc. I immediately get an HTTP 404 Error “The page cannot be found.” Additionally, I noticed there is no fourth “Forums” tab in my Settings –> BP menu.

My IT guys keep telling me that I need to run some “more trials” before they’ll get involved, but I can’t really do much while I can’t even figure out how to create a group!!

Can you give me some ammo here? Do I need to push these IT guys around to get an IP address set up or something? I really just need to start studying here, don’t I? 😛 I have no idea what I’m doing here so any advice would be great. And like Ron, I definitely won’t forget to return the favor someday. 🙂

Hi Fee … looks like I’m making some progress and I’ve answered some of my questions and I’m starting to understand how bbPress and BP work individually and together. Let me keep going and hopefully I should be fine. Thanks for your help.

Ron

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